Gadfly: Who's a plonker now, then?

They may be relieved, nonetheless, to learn that it means nothing more than oxen keeper or scribe - as in "notary" - just as Mr Coward was a cow herd, Mr Silly was originally middle English "seely" (cheerful), Mr Daft was humble and Mr Bonkers - well, there've even been one or two of those.

Hookers will be happy to know that their relatively new profession was making or selling hooks, neither did Arlotts drop their aitches among other things. They were Old French rascals, no more.

The information's contained in a new book called Searching For Surnames, which has also scoured the countryside for Hedgehogs, Tadpoles and Ramsbottoms - "the valley where wild garlic grows" - found 21 Pillocks ("mainly in Leicestershire") and 34 Plonkers ("30 in Surrey and seven in Hampshire")

Who's a Plonker now, then?

Many of these unfortunate (shall we say?) surnames have wholly innocent origins, although the Doolittles really were lazy beggars and the Doubtfires, with apologies to Robin Williams, were terrified of flames.

As for the Bastards....well, there's no wonder most of them changed by deed poll.

Though there are still plenty unsullied elsewhere, a check of North-East telephone directories suggests that the region now has no Virgins whatsoever.

SEARCHING for Surnames by John Titford (Countryside Books, £11.95) also reveals that the surname Sunderland - Norman Sunderland, memory suggests, was one of Darlington's best known historians - isn't from the big city by the Wear but a small hamlet near Halifax.

Readers can nonetheless win a copy of the book by answering a very simple question: when did Sunderland last score in the FA Cup final at Wembley?

Answers by e-mail, post or telephone (01325) 505085 by next Monday - after which, first out of the hat.

SWEET Fanny Adams, whose name also lives on, was a young lady "murdered and cut up" - says Chambers Dictionary - around 1812. The Oxford reckons it was 1867.

Neither explains why "Sweet Fanny Adams" became naval slang for tinned mutton and a euphemism for nothing at all.

We mention the unfortunate lady following last week's reference to Fanny Cradock, television's first celebrity chef, and to her husband Johnny's wish that viewers might have "doughnuts like Fanny's."

Apocryphal or otherwise, Doughnuts Like Fanny's is also the title - by remarkable coincidence - of a "life and times of Fanny Cradock" play being staged at Bishop Auckland Town Hall on Thursday October 24.

"Sex, songs and souffles," promises town hall marketing man Craig Million.

The play's written by Newcastle-based Julia Darling who may also have written the promotional stuff: "Fanny Cradock was a complex, difficult woman who had illegitimate children she pretended didn't exist.

"She was extremely mean, had a very shady and unhappy past and was by all accounts incredibly dirty in her habits - to the extent that people eating titbits after her shows suffered food poisoning."

She also invented the prawn cocktail, it says. Surely not?

AMONG its unnumbered treasures, and under the heading "Odes of the Month", the Internet offers a poem on Fanny's in the Hampshire village of Alton. The final two verses may explain the Navy's rum do:

At just that time, as chance would seemingly dictate,

The Navy changed its issue to the tars

From salted tack to low grade tins of salted mutton,

Giving rise to rumours in the bars

That Fanny's end and their unwelcome ration

Were juxtaposed in some unpleasant fashion.

And so the English language found a new expression

From this sad tale of local pain,

And far beyond the confines of the Royal Navy,

Folk would use poor Fanny's name in vain.

And even here in Alton I would say,

Not many now would give a sweet FA.

HIS e-mail headed "Can you tell Stork from butter", Tom Purvis in Sunderland (who spreads his pearls ever generously) sends a transcript of an ITV4 programme shown at the end of September.

Called The Showbiz Set, it also talked of television from the Fanny and Johnny era - when methods of measuring viewing figures were rudimentary.

Ann Valery, a former ITV presenter, recalled that they bought an IBM computer - "It took up an enormous room" - in an attempt to do the job more scientifically.

"It was run by a wonderful Hungarian who discovered that Tightrope, one of the dramas, was very popular with sadists and that Bonanza was popular with homosexuals because it was three brothers and a father and the woman always died, or left, or was a bitch.

"Worst of all, he discovered that BBC viewers ate more margarine than those who were watching commercial television.

"As we lived by margarine commercials, the conclusion had to be hidden."

LIKE Fanny Cradock, the writer Jeffrey Bernard featured in last week's note on obituaries - passing reference, as it were.

Bernard spent most of his waking hours in the Coach and Horses in Soho, a pub also frequented - "in memory of him, not because I like beer" - by John Milburn in Chester-le-Street.

On Bernard's death bed, says John, a consultant introduced him to a group of student medics as "the man who spends half the day clogging up his arteries with nicotine and the other half diluting the nicotine with vodka."

Little wonder that Jeffrey Bernard was unwell.

The Coach and Horses, incidentally, was run by a Frenchman called Norman Ballon, reckoned Britain's rudest landlord. "I once had the pleasure of seeing him go crazy when a foreign tourist brought in her young son purely to use the facilities," John recalls.

Britain's rudest landlord was hitherto thought to have been the late Walton Siddle of the Cowshill Hotel in Weardale, who took perverse pride in the claim. It's sad that a play-off can't be arranged - a slanging match, if ever.

WE'D also been discussing neat headlines, like the Mirror's - "He's Basel faulty" - after Liverpool and England striker Michael Owen failed to score in Switzerland.

What, though, if Middlesbrough's Szilard Nemeth proves England's undoing in the international against Slovakia this weekend? Sven's Nemethis, if ever.